Introduction of the development of PMS in China from the perspective of enterprises and practitioners

Article Description: Product management In the past life-today.

This paper introduces the market reason, theoretical basis and subject category of PMS. In this article, will focus on the current domestic development of PMS, mainly from the enterprise and practitioners two aspects of the explanation. It is recommended that all product managers, or companies that adopt or are about to adopt PMS, read.

Characteristics of the domestic PMS

The PMS is produced by the transformation from "production" to "consumer" as the center of Industrial production, and for enterprises, the fundamental aim is to produce "marketable" products with limited resources, and to maintain long-term profitability and development.

To achieve this goal, through the choice of market, PMS has become the most suitable for the enterprise development of the organizational structure. Since the 1927 PMS proposed by Procter and Gamble, after 80 years of development, PMS with the changing market conditions gradually plump and perfect, and recognized and accepted by all walks of life in the world.

specifically to the domestic, the general view is that the PMS from the late 1990s into China, first of all by the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry "Note: This view is a general understanding of domestic product management, specifically not for textual research, only for reference", but because of the particularity of the pharmaceutical industry, and not in the whole industry. And with the infiltration of various foreign management ideas and emerging industries "note: specifically the Internet, software, hardware and telecommunications industries," the development of the PMS began to develop gradually in the country, the specific performance of the following characteristics.

Fig. 1 Industry distribution of domestic product managers

Uneven development of the industry

At home, the general understanding is that "medicine, consumer goods industry is the PMS of the domestic starting industry", until now, these industries are also the PMS faithful performer. In addition, the emerging industries, especially with foreign enterprises more contact, the gap is smaller than the industry, such as it, communications, finance, home appliances and other industries, have been widely used in the PMS, and show a growing trend. However, some traditional industries in China, the performance is not very obvious, as shown in Figure 1.

Uneven development of the region

In the domestic, the economy developed area Enterprise uses the PMS the quantity to be far more than the economic relative backwardness area enterprise, CPRC has done a statistic, to its current member carries on the sampling survey, discovered that Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong three product manager quantity accounted for the survey quantity more than 60%.

Uneven development of enterprises

Even in the same industry, the use of PMS in different enterprises, its cognitive and application capabilities are not the same. This kind of understanding and the application level difference, directly causes the PMS in this profession the influence degree and the expansibility.

PMS development of better enterprises can give priority to provide resources for the guarantee, and in the PMs development of Enterprises, the PMS department has been reduced to "chicken" role, some companies even began to doubt whether the PMS can really bring value to the enterprise.

Imitation copy Serious

PMS has not been in China for a long time, but it has been adopted by Chinese companies for two reasons: the first is that multinational companies enter China and the PMS are established to ensure the consistency of the global system; second, Chinese enterprises want to learn advanced management ideas of foreign enterprises and actively introduce PMS.

But no matter which reason, must have a prerequisite, is must "seek truth from facts", cannot "imitate", otherwise only will appear "acclimatized".

The quality of the employees

As far as the current situation, the domestic also very lack of excellent product managers, especially front-line product management staff, such as product managers, brand managers and so on. In addition to the time problem, there are three reasons for this.

lack of corporate awareness: The establishment and operation of PMS involves the entire enterprise architecture, which requires that the knowledge of PMs not only be clear to high-level and practitioner, but also that the relevant business units must be able to understand clearly, otherwise the PMS will not work well.

lack of corresponding theoretical system: PMS is based on the subject category of "Marketing", but it does not mean that the theory of PMS is consistent with the theory of "Marketing". Like aircraft production, aircraft production itself belongs to the subject of "aeronautical manufacture", however, the subject of aircraft manufacturing is not limited to this, but also involves "material science", "aerodynamics", "fluid physics", and so on, only the development of these disciplines in order to promote the overall "aviation manufacturing" progress.

Fig. 2 The nature distribution of the enterprise of domestic product management

Similarly, the PMS in the development of the 80, on the one hand, along with the development of marketing, its basic knowledge more and more rich; on the other hand, with the demand of the PMS, the knowledge level is expanding to the original irrelevant field, gradually beginning to form an independent discipline-product management.

But in the present situation, this discipline is still a long way from forming an independent system and perfecting it. Although there are some foreign books in this regard, but the overall view, or to introduce experience, the lack of the necessary system.

lack of sufficient talent training mechanism : The PMS system is again effective, the lack of high-quality professional personnel to carry out the implementation is also useless. As far as the present situation is, most product management practitioners are from the original "market" or "technology" personnel transformation, coupled with the enterprise does not have a perfect training system, such talent development "difficult", and even many practitioners to the present, do not understand what product management is doing. On the one hand is the Enterprise regrets "no high-quality product Management professionals", on the other hand, "most practitioners lack of product management capacity", the contradiction in 2-3 years will continue to exist.

The way to solve the PMS situation

Now that you know the problem, the next step is how to solve the problem and change the status quo. Can be summed up in the following four kinds.

Cognitive ambiguity

There are two levels of cognition here: first, enterprises in the adoption of PMS can not objectively assess their own actual situation, find the most suitable for their own form of the PMS, just imitate similar enterprises; second, the PMS itself does not have a clear understanding of how to introduce, build and operate, do not know what kind of norms and procedures need to be developed, Do not know what kind of people, how to configure personnel, and so on, this series of problems if the use of PMs did not understand, even on the PMS, also play no role.

To solve this problem, it is the real attitude of enterprises. Enterprise is really hope that through the use of PMS to make their own long-term beneficial development, or fashion, blindly follow, see others using the PMS, also followed, this is definitely a problem!

Therefore, the enterprise before the PMS, must think clearly what the PMS is for! Before the PMS, companies can ask themselves three questions first.

Do I feel satisfied with the current enterprise production process?

Do I know what is wrong with the current enterprise production process?

Can I withstand the cost of PMS? (These costs include financial, resistance, traditional forces) if you have a very clear "affirmative" attitude to these three questions, then you are in the process of preparing for the specific PMS, which requires doing the following four things.

Comprehensive evaluation of the status of the enterprise: including the current structure, personnel quality, business processes, department attitude and so on. Assessment of the status quo to be able to "know", in order to understand if the PMS, the greatest resistance may be from where.

PMS Consulting: General PMs, so to speak, the company's internal familiar with the PMS almost no, therefore, the need for some "blood", relying on "external forces", mainly to engage in the PMS research institutions to consult, let them put forward suitable suggestions as a reference. Because to know, the PMS system is diverse, enterprises adopt what kind of system is the most suitable, not by fantasy out.

At this stage, neither imagination nor full reference should be made to the advice. In fact, as a business, since the PMS, we should spend some time or set up an improvement team to do some internal knowledge accumulation work, this is very necessary. Otherwise, "Two eyes and one smear", nothing is clear.

Personnel Preparation: How many people are needed? What is the role of each person? How do I configure it? It all needs to be figured out. After these decisions, it depends on whether the enterprise can meet the personnel requirements. Just mentioned that the enterprise better have an improvement team, at this stage, the improvement team can be the staff preferred library, if the discovery is not satisfied, you need to consider the external employment.

Knowledge Preparation: system form, personnel are in place, next is to prepare the corresponding norms, processes and systems. On the one hand can improve the work of the team to complete, on the other hand can refer to the content of similar enterprises, and combined with their own situation to improve, but in any case, only a principle: executable.

The above four points do not fully explain that as long as the following to do, there is nothing to worry about. It is easy to establish a PMS, but it is a long process to run and eventually improve, and in the process there may even be a variety of frictions. As a business, we must be prepared for this.

Fundamentally speaking, if the enterprise in the establishment of the PMS, the perception is very clear, the determination is very firm, then the PMS in the enterprise development has not half the resistance, there is no "or not on the PMs" question, but "how to make the PMS work well" specific job.

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